Brand stared at this man.
"Then you—?" He dared not complete the question.
"I? Oh, I had nothing to do with it, any more than yourself. It was a Camorra affair."
He had been speaking quite indifferently; but now a singular change came over his manner.
"And if I had had something to do with it?" he said, vehemently; and the dark eyes were burning with a quick anger under the heavy brows. Then he spoke more slowly, but with a firm emphasis in his speech. "I will tell you a little story; it will not detain you, sir. Suppose that you have a prison so overstocked with political prisoners that you must keep sixty or seventy in the open yard adjoining the outer wall. You have little to fear; they are harmless, poor wretches; there are several old men—two women. Ah! but what are the poor devils to do in those long nights that are so dark and so cold? However they may huddle together, they freeze; if they keep not moving, they die; you find them dead in the morning. If you are a Czar you are glad of that, for your prisons are choked; it is very convenient. And, then suppose you have a clever fellow who finds out a narrow passage between the implement-house and the wall; and he says,
'There, you can work all night at digging a passage out; and who in the morning will suspect?' Is not that a fine discovery, when one must keep moving in the dark to prevent one's self stiffening into a corpse? Oh yes; then you find the poor devils, in their madness, begin to tear the ground up; what tools have they but their fingers, when the implement-house is locked? The poor devils!—old men, too, and women; and how they take their turn at the slow work, hour after hour, week after week, all through the long, still nights! Inch by inch it is; and the poor devils become like rabbits, burrowing for a hole to reach the outer air; and do you know that, after a time, the first wounds heal, and your fingers become like stumps of iron—"
He held out his two hands; the ends of the fingers were seamed and corrugated, as if they had been violently scalded. But he could not hold them steady—they were trembling with the suppressed passion that made his whole frame tremble.
"Relay after relay, night after night, week after week, month after month, until those poor devils of rabbits had actually burrowed a passage out into the freedom of God's world again. And some said the Czar himself had heard of it, and would not interfere, for the prisons were choked; and some said the wife of the governor was Polish, and had a kind heart; but what did it matter when the time was drawing near? And always this clever fellow—do you know, sir, his name was Verdt too?—encouraging, helping, goading these poor people on. Then the last night—how the miserable rabbits of creatures kept huddled together, shivering in the dark, till the hour arrived! and then the death-like stillness they found outside; and the wild wonder and fear of it; and the old men and the women crying like children to find themselves in the free air again. Marie Falevitch—that was my sister-in-law—she kissed me, and was laughing when she whispered, 'Eljen a haza!' I think she was a little off her head with the long, sleepless nights."
He stopped for a second; his throat seemed choked.
"Did I tell you they had all got out?—the poor devils all wondering there, and scarcely knowing where to go. And now suppose, sir—ah! you don't know anything about these things, you happy English people—suppose you found the black night around you all at once turned to a blaze of fire—red hell opened on all sides of you, and the bullets plowing your comrades down; the old men crying for mercy, the young ones falling only with a groan; the women—my God! Did you ever hear a woman shriek when she was struck